Japanese soda

From Carls wiki

I got a can of soda from Yukiko once. I became so fascinated with the mis-rendered English slogan on the front ("Pure and refresh"), that I decided to try and understand what the Japanese words say.

Image:Japanese soda from front.jpg Bjarni already helped me with the big, block-like letters in front. They say "Karupisu (Calpis) so-da", in the phonetic alphabet katakana, used in Japan for spelling foreign words.

Further down we see kanji (Chinese pictograms) mixed with hiragana (phonetic signs for Japanese words).

Bjarni

The text at the bottom says "Shiroku hajikeru oishisa", which I will amateurishly interpret as approximately "A white burst of goodness". Babelfish guesses "It can repel white, it is tasty". The first character is the kanji for shiro, white, and the rest are hiragana phonetic syllables. Ku and sa appear as grammatical suffixes modifying the adjectives white and good - shiroku is in the, er, continuative form, and oishisa makes goodness (tastiness) out of good (tasty, oishii).

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Image:Japanese soda from back.jpg More kanji and hiragana. The style of it all looks like typical content declarations (and reassurances of recyclability), but that's all I know.

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Image:Japanese soda from top.jpg The writing here is most likely instructions for opening the bottle.

Bjarni

With a little bit of gimping I managed to read both instructions: "1. Tabu o okosu" and "2. Tabu o modosu". They mean "1. Lift tab" and "2. Return tab".

Link

• Labeling of Beer. How to read the information on a beer can (Example) — Brewers Association of Japan